How Gnosis 3.0 Paves the Way for Mass Adoption - Friederike Ernst. Ep. #557

Transcript

we deployed the first smart contract to ethereum back in the day it was a prediction Market on our then competitor augus um token sale whether it would sell out or not we were so early that we started building lots of foundational infrastructure for the wide the ecosystem so we've built things like um the nosis safe cow swab zodiac Dow tooling nosis chain all products and projects built within nosis should approve value to the nosis Token when you have a open platform anyone can kind of make the user experience better in 10 years all the infrastructure will be blockchain based welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the

Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the global blockchain Revolution I'm Seb and today we have a bit of a treat because one of the hosts is becoming a guest that's right we have FICA Ernst who is co-founder at nosis and she's in the in the guest seat today because we're going to be talking about nosis and specifically nosis 3.0 and their updated vision and thesis for the platform before you do that though here's a few words from our sponsors this episode is proudly brought to you by nosis a Visionary Collective committed to fostering and expanding applications for a decentralized future nosis is at the Forefront of innovation with nosis pay

circles and metry revolutionizing open Banking and creating a superior form of money Mone with Hashi and nosis VPN they are building a more resilient and privacy focused open internet are you seeking a robust L1 to launch your project well look no further than nosis chain enjoy the same development environment as ethereum but with significantly lower transaction fees and with a robust network of over 200,000 validators nosis chain stands as a credibly neutral and resilient foundation for your application governance and nosis is driven by nosis Dow where everyone has a voice in shaping the Project's future join the nosis community today by participating in the nosis D governance form you can deploy your project on the evm

compatible and highly decentralized nosis chain or help secure the network by running a validator with just a single gno and lowcost Hardware embark on your journey towards decentralization today at nosis doio car one is one of the biggest node operators globally and help you stake your tokens on 45 plus networks like ethereum Cosmos C last year and dydx more than 100,000 delegators stake with corus one including institutions like bitgo and Ledger sticking with course one not only gets you the highest years but also the most robust security practices and infrastructure that are usually exclusive for institutions you

can stake directly to cor one's public note from your wallet set up a white label note or use the recently launched product Opus to stake up to8 ,000 e in a single transaction you can even offer high yield staking to your own customers using their API your assets always remain in your custody so you can have complete Peace of Mind start sing today at chorus. onea how's it feel to be a a guest on epicenter for the first time I am weirdly nervous about this I mean I've I've been on probably like 200 epicenter episodes um and this is the first time as a guest it feels weird it's nice it's nice though yeah it's uh I think Brian

was a guest once like way way back in the day he uh had I had interviewed him about his whole uh Bitcoin comicazi uh uh attack uh thesis uh Sunny's been on for sure um but I I don't think mahare has been a guest anyway but yeah happy to do this and um really cool to you know see nosis continue to grow as an ecosystem like very organically but um always like up and to the right so um um let's let's get started so like for folks who are coming at this with a fresh set of eyes uh what is nosis and what's the background here I think like

most people of course are familiar with nosis as like a longtime builder in the space one of the very first companies to be uh to build on ethereum and has gone through several of iterations of products and Visions but yeah what's the nosis vision today and how did you guys get here so we've been around for um in blockchain terms a very long time we were we deployed the first smart contract to ethereum back in the day it was a prediction Market on our then competitor augur um token sale whether it would sell out or not um yeah so basically we've been around for a super long time we started as a prediction Market platform um we were so early that we started building lots of foundational

infrastructure for The Wider theum ecosystem so we've built things like um the nois safe cow swap zodiac Dow tooling nosis chain obviously um and a couple of other infrastructure projects that are still um around uh and alive today um many of course are not but I think this is this is uh the natural course of building stuff and uh we have recently pivoted a little bit um to what we call nois 3.0 basically from building foundational infrastructure for the for the wi e ecosystem um to building adaps that are meant to be usable eventually by actual real human people who want to

use it because it works better than what they currently have mass adoption we're going to get there yeah I mean we've been saying this every boil market and not me personally but kind of the space has been saying this every boil Market since 2015 probably I feel like this time it's true though because we have built so much technology that actually um allows us to abstract things away from the user so for instance one example is the seat phrase right the seat phrase it's a terrible user experience it's these are your 24 words don't ever lose them but also never show them to anyone or or everything else

gone I mean this doesn't work this doesn't work for us it doesn't work for the wider uh public um so but having that um that self- custodial element and that permissionless that kind of comes with it um but having a much much better user experience this is something that kind of we can create now and uh consequentially I think that this is actually the poll Market in which we will see consumer adoption one of the things I I like about most and I I find like quite commendable is that it it appears as though like the organization is very value driven um and staying very true to like the original ethos of

crypto like um have custody of your assets uh running your own nodes um and up you know getting to financial sovereignty and I I think that in a lot of in a in a lot of cases you know teams that sort start with that original Vision or uh or or start with those original values that over time maybe get corrupted uh in order to achieve better efficiency in order to build better products like how have you guys been able to maintain um like such a high uh high level of focus on like the the vision and the the the values of

crypto while at the same time building Tech that enables users to uh you know to abstract away as you said like all this kind of complex technology I think I would disagree with the premise of the question a little bit I think in the past we've not done this successfully so in the past I think we've built very much for people in the space who already knew how it worked um and who were already um accustomed to the uh user experience um drawbacks of crypto so I think um things like um the NOS say for instance under the hood it's it's fantastic Tech um it's very much not a retail um it's not a retail

product um same for for C actually for most dexas um it's they're not retail products as such um so kind of so far we've kind of optimized for building things that kind of stay true to the the ethos and thereby sometimes neglecting user experience in terms of I mean maybe it's not even fair to call it neglecting so kind of we've prioritized building truly decentralized Tech over usability um and I think that's kind of been that's kind of come to our detriment um many times over the years where kind of we saw um competitors kind of pull ahead um because kind of they were they they were

um taking shortcuts and I mean completely fine but I think now we're actually in a place where we can build everything on a uh completely uh decentralized stack and I think kind of it's It's kind of it's It's Time to kind of think about why we actually wanted to do this in the first place right so if you think about why would you build anything on a completely decentralized stack um from an engineering standpoint it's a complete pain so building anything building everything on kind of AWS uh would much much easier and faster so um kind of thinking back to what exactly the the decentralization value proposition was um I think kind of it

comes um in uh three uh it comes as as a triptic right so basically the first thing is actually um decentralized ownership so kind of if you do anything on the internet today kind of it Acres value to the same five companies and people behind the companies um and with uh with uh decentralized Technologies we can kind of decentralize ownership um in in uh in that sense the second thing is individualized agency so kind of on on the um uh on web 3 we can lower um the barrier to entry for people very significantly so they can have access to things they previously didn't have and

this uh this also um includes kind of coordination in very large scales and Dows and so on and the thir is actually user experience ironically um because kind of when you have an open platform anyone can kind of make the user experience better so if I kind of have a killer feature idea for a centralized product like Google Maps there's no way I can kind of integrate it but kind of in the uh at that point where you kind of have a decentralized Google Maps um I could for instance say um I know exactly how um I'll give you I'll give give you a fictitious example here I know exactly how um uh traffic light uh the traffic lights are set in Berlin so I can give you

better um estimates of how long it it'll take um to get places based on kind of which which which phase they in and so on um and I could kind of just add that onto the existing decentralized Google Maps product and you you can't do that kind of if you're building on centralized technology so kind of um when when we think about kind of what can we actually build now that has additional value to retail users I think these are kind of the three prongs that kind of we we need to look at so can can we make things can we can we benefit users from making um ownership more decentralized can we um uh make things accessible to users that previously

weren't accessible to them um and can we kind of uh build a platform on which anyone can innovate okay so where does theosis 3o Vision fit into all of this and you what what is the nosis 3.0 vision and how did you arrive to this this state of nosis Yeah so basically nosis 3.0 vision is is uh twofold one is uh just very organizational so kind of I think in the past because we have built so many things people were always confused about kind of how it relates to the nosis token and kind of it clarifies that so um it kind of very clearly specifies that um all uh all products and projects

built within nosis should acove value to the nosis Token either directly or indirectly and the way that that can happen is either they use gno as um as its own token or they kind of um have a different token that then is value coupled against the nosis token so for instance safe um they have their own token um and uh it it gets put into um an automated Market maker against gno so kind of if safe appreciates gno will appreciate and vice versa so kind of um without using the same token um and kind of while having in kind of um independent kind of um act the way that's in the interest of each project individually you can still economically

couple them together um and we do that both with with projects that um we have spun out and with um projects we have invested in so nosis has has actually we have invested in over 80 projects um over the last uh six years or so so kind of like a mini VC um and we hold um very significant positions in uh many other tokens consequently and kind of we can cover them the same way so for instance one example um for instance would be aronas so we hold $50 million worth in autonomous tokens so kind of recouple it to the gno Token this way there's no

uh provide what cosos we call like protocol owned liquidity where um nosis the chain can provide liquidity saying like no token to a protocol in exchange for that protocol's token and like this this is used particularly in the case of the cosmos Hub where the Hub um provides atom liquidity say to like a DEX and then that decks uh in return it's sort of like a a cross-chain swap essentially and then it aligns you know incentives both ways uh do you guys engage in that sort of this is exactly what we do um so uh yeah protocol own liquidity is also what we call it in our books um and it works amazingly well for us um and then

obviously we have nosis chain so the you know tokens the staking token for nosis chain nosis chain is um very decentralized so there's 230,000 validators which is um 20% of what ethereum has um and you can we we have intentionally lowered the barrier to entry for staking so that interested lay people can kind of become a part of this network so you need one gno costs around $350 these days and you can run it on um most Hardwares you need uh and uh yeah we we try to make it easy four people um you get uh between 10 and 15% apy um it's it's uh lots of people do

um just for the fun uh of kind of be being part of a um decentralized Network I think it's it's in terms of Technology it is a similar degree of um technical expertise required to running um an ethereum node but only a fraction of the capital requirements so kind of the the validator set is very large for us how big is theosis validator now it's like 230,000 validators right there's a lot of validators right but but just like just like an ethereum validator this is essentially like every validator is a chunk of you know like 32 no or or something like that right so it's not to

so do you have an idea of like how many individual stakers that is yeah so it's difficult to kind of pinpoint exactly and also um that's deliberate to a certain uh point but it must be around 2,000 um individuals um who kind of uh uh who who uh who are validators on the network this make sound like a kind of silly question because I don't know this but are are is there liquid staking in yes we also have liquid staking I mean anyone can kind of run a liquid Staker on top of no so kind of it's It's permissionless that way um we don't encourage it particularly um just because uh as soon as you have liquid

staking you have um you have economies of scale again and then uh you end up in a kind of liol like situation where a significant portion of um the staked um asset actually rests with one set of contracts and that's um that's yeah I think this is difficult from a network P perspective if you kind of if if you want to make your network as resilient as possible this is not a great situation to be in but um what we also have and this was um this we actually had the first instance startup this week is um oo uh which is uh decentralized

validator exactly yeah and there's also Diva which also decentralized validation and so so and we've we've also those are also among the projects that we as noses have invested into um just to make sure that kind of um the ecosystem remains robust right so how are you leveraging obal um OBO runs on nosis chain um just like uh like it does on minut okay got it okay interesting so this this pivot from building foundational infrastructure to daps uh what does that mean s of or organizationally does it mean that nosis uh is taking a step back in terms

of maintaining the the foundational infrastructure and uh will have more uh sort of product people building daps internally or are you investing or financing dap developers to build on the infrastructure well so yeah how does that kind of yeah that's that's the other part of the nois 3.0 Vision um so that's kind of um the idea that now we kind of have to build um applications that kind of serve real people with real problems um we will not stop um maintaining the infrastructure for sure so kind of like part of the infrastructure projects are spun out so um safe and cow and zodiac and so on they their their own things just as Kat

which we retain uh you know large stake in uh but they are their own projects and they kind of we we have no hand and kind of running them operationally in any way um so and nosis chain yes we will absolutely continue maintaining it um it is more of a coordinative role um kind of just like you wouldn't say the E theorum Foundation kind of runs ethereum um kind of we have a coda coordinator um and uh we have all the different clients that are most of the different kinds that um ethereum mainnet also has so they have dedicated nosis chain teams and kind of we have someone in-house who coordinates those teams but in principle

um that is pretty coordinate that is pretty decentralized and we don't have to do a lot of thing things there are other things where kind of we do have a hand in kind of making sure that um foundational infrastructure is there for the nosis ecosystem so things like making sure there are block explorers making sure um the rpcn points work and so on um usually that that just um that is run via the nosis St so kind of the rpcn point providers and uh and uh uh the blog Explorer providers and so on they just um make a proposal to the noses down obviously we review this but so do all others other G know H so kind of this kind of um it is we we still

feel responsible for it to a certain degree but it actually runs pretty well on its own and this idea that kind of we will pivot to um to uh applications and specifically uh payments and financial rails applications this is the other the other half of the nosis 3.0 Vision yeah I want to talk about the the the payments and financial rails in a second because I think that's actually one of the most interesting things here so how did we get there so we we just literally sat down with a blank sheet of paper and kind of um brainstormed where we think we can add the most value with the technology stack that we currently sit on um and there

were a couple of contenders another one was social media because obviously clearly would um benefit a lot from kind of being on a credibly neutral platform um but the easiest lift in terms of Technology um seemed payments um while at the same time the business model that kind of payments comes with it's very clear so kind of this this is tried and tested a million times so um we kind of eliminated as many unknowns as possible and said okay this is where we can provide something that is actually useful to a very significant number of people and we think we can build it with what we currently have that that that's uh that was basically the rationale

behind it yeah so I'd like to talk about NOA Stow a little bit and um its role in governing the nosis infrastructure um what what aspects of the infrastructure does it govern is it is it just nosis chain or does it have uh also a role to play in other of the foundational infrastructure like the safe or like what are the interactions I guess between nois da and and the safe Dow and you know some of the other infrastructure that you have uh that's a fantastic question so um first of all it doesn't really govern nosis chain so there's very few parameters that the da actually sets in principle kind of nosis

chain is is governed by the validator set um because they kind of they decide on whether to upgrade their noes to which software um if if you if the validators are not Bo there'll be a hard fork and so on um so uh and then there's there's actually a lot of other stakeholders that also kind of influence nosis chain often not as um directly as the validator set so things like the core developers um the the stable coin providers um the rpcn point providers the Oracle providers centralized exchanges and so on all basically that

entire set set of actors they somehow govern um nosis chain together just like the same is true for E right we wouldn't say ethereum the ethereum foundation governs ethereum and it's the same for nosis what um the nosis da actually mainly does is allocate treasury so the nosis St sits on a very large treasury around 500 million um in uh gno and another 500 million in um ether and stable coins and um other uh other tokens um and the the nosis token kind of um is a voting token in the Dow so um the allocation of funds happens via the

Dow this is kind of the main um the main uh thing that the Dow does and then kind of it tries to align um all of these um portfolio tokens of portfolio companies with nosis interest so for instance um nosis Dow holds 20% um of the safe token Supply um so obviously kind of there are talks between nosis Dow and safe Dow about kind of like how to align each um each other strategically um and then uh kind of just because kind of there's very large aligned economic interest between the two Dows um and uh yeah in principle that should be um much more

out in the open so I think a lot of this actually happens um like for all Ds at the moment kind of behind closed doors and different telegram groups and then kind of proposals get posted and kind of there's protocol politicians and so on um I think coming to a point where a lot of that is transparent and um open to anyone who kind of wants to join that discussion um I think this is somewhere we need to get to um one initiative that we're beheading is kind of having um having um a dedicated Forum page um for each large holding um in tokens that nosesa has where kind of people can talk

about the Strategic alignment say between noses and safe and what safe should do for us and what we should do for safe um and uh kind of what what happens if the this doesn't happen because always kind of when you hold tokens obviously divestment is always an option right so um yeah basically having having these alliances out in the open um that are currently and I mean I'm not even a part of most of these alliances they kind of they happen between different you know uh token holders and safe token holders and uh they can of result in proposals in the forums but yeah so in principle this is how um this is how noses and the portfolio companies or projects kind of align themselves

what's the philos phos ophy in terms of capital uh allocation management like is the nosis philosophy to have all of the capital uh the treasury managed by the Dow or you do do you guys have uh like sort of organizations that uh are allocated pools of capital with like a board that that itself allocates Capital so like for instance in Cosmos like the Hub allocated quite a bit of capital to this organization called AOW they have a team that reviews grant grant proposals and you know issues those proposals so it's you know it's sort of Outsourcing that work because what what I mean I think what we found here at least in Cosmos governance was that the Hub was

not really like the token holders were not always the uh better the best equipped uh to make decisions about what to allocate Capital to and and so this is why like part of uh the cosmos treasury was allocated to a AA da does something like this exist in nosis yes so historically this has grown so kind of um back in the day company actually conducted the token sale and that company still holds a small part of the treasury and kind of from that company we do actually uh do product in product development mostly um anyone else could in principle um ask for a grant from noses Dow to do the same um but um so

far this has happened once so kind of we had once a proposal was a very large proposal um of a group of people who credibly um claimed to what to do um Business Development and ecosystem building on our behalf because uh uh Business Development and marketing and so on they they were never our strong suits and they said look you allocate us this Capital we we we can do it for you and in the end kind of the the funds were were return because it didn't go so well but in principle NOS St is very much open to that um so kind of having having different contributors in charge of different things and one one

relationship where that's actually worked incredibly well for nosis in the past is the relationship with kapaki which is also a DA that has spun out of nosis um it's a treasury management da um so they manage our treasury but also the safe and cow treasuries as well as Lio and ARA and balancer um and a number of ins and a number of other Dows um and for us this has worked super well because um we don't want our Capital to lie fellow but obviously this is not something that um that a DA can vote on kind of on you know on a CA in a Cadence that makes sense you can't say we want

to vote on whether to withdraw funds from the this pool and so on so this is also um what um drove the development of the zodiac Dow tooling so um so that kind of we can we we as noar could hand this over to kapaki without them having custody of the funds so they can now do things to they can do certain operations to the funds um that they're being uh that that they're managing but they for instance they can't withdraw them and or sell them and so on they kind of they have a per they have a permissioned list of um uh of things they can do to the funds um kind of like like a fund manager okay no

interesting yeah I mean uh I guess it works for as long as it works right if the Dow uh and the token holders are effective in allocating that capital and that the community at at large is satisfied with how capital is is managed and uh and allocated then then makes sense to sort of continue in in in this configuration um yeah no but I I'm 100% with you so kind of dows and no D included need to become much much more efficient so I think kind of the one thing that kind of we need to understand is that the uh the very constrained um thing in Dows is attention and kind of paying for the

attention of um the of the participants um and kind of only escalating certain decisions kind of delegating some decisions to others I think this is this is infrastructure that kind of we as an ecosystem very much still have to build up because um kind of saying for instance um I I uh I trust um xy's um judgment in terms of Treasury allocation but I don't want them in charge of say the marketing um the marketing tactics and so on I want someone else chart of that and kind of saying telling people basically having a way of kind of

delegating your vote depending on what topic um you're voting I think this is uh this will be a great Mo for the ecosystem yeah what one of the things that we've seen s of experimented with in the cosmos EOS system is is the use of subd dows so Cosmos Dow infrastructure at least like the Dow Dow infrastructure that's used um primarily allow for for subd Dows and so some some ecosystems or some some chains have uh created subd Dows right so you have like the treasury and then the treasury will allocate uh uh some Capital to another Dow and then that Dow would have members that manage like a smaller pool of members that manage that Capital say for

like marketing or Business Development or uh Project funding and the the the the parent Dow you know has some amount of uh also um power over revoking you know some of those members if if the community feels that like members are not acting in in a way that's desirable like they can revoke access uh they can veto certain types of proposals so it creates like I think a really streamlined uh architecture for Dows to reallocate pools of capitals to to other Dows instead of like sending that money to just some organization offchain right that uh has a pool like members that um that aren't accountable directly accountable on chain to the to

the parent out yeah I I think that makes a lot of sense and I think this is also by and large how traditional companies are structured right kind of like you have a marketing department that has a certain budget and if they go totally off the rails you kind of you have you have heads rolling and then kind of you and I think this is exactly how kind of it needs to work in Dows down the line as well but obviously kind of putting all of these things that um all of these mechanisms on chain it's always a bit of a challenge yeah so let's talk about the payments Focus here uh so so nosis pay is I think one of the the main products that um uh you launched in in last year uh that uh is is actually like quite

interesting we talked about this on on when you were on the interupt podcast a couple months ago and all the cool Tech behind nosis pay that allows people to uh have money like basic basically like on an onchain address and and the credit card signing the transaction and it's it's actually like quite quite cool I think technically uh but there's other there's two other products here that I'm not very familiar with which is circles I know that's a your um uh univ Universal basic income protocol and then metri that I'm not very familiar with so yeah what what's the what's the overlying thesis here like why did you you know when you sat down and like thought about what this infrastructure could be used for uh why did payments uh stand out as the the the the vertical

where you could provide the most value that's just going to ask a question um so if you kind of look at payments in our bubble kind of like and I don't mean the web 3 bubble but kind of like the global North bubble payments are not a lot of are not a big paino for us so kind of you can send funds um to your friends you know in a couple of minutes at more or less zero cost you you can get you have access to loans you have credit cards kind of everything kind of works for you um this can't be set for a lot of the rest of the world so um I mean even for us there are some edge cases where we kind of feel the

limitations of the financial system so recently for instance I had to send um a re a fairly significant um amount of uh money to the United St States for an investment um and uh it cost me I think1 with wise um to kind of send it and I mean obviously had I had I just sent usdc it would have cost me almost nothing um but uh I mean those are edge cases by and large kind of payments work well for us um if you look at for instance um Latin America or even countries like turkey um in Europe um we see that inflation runs rampant and even

access to a dollarized account is a status symbol to us that's not even a product anymore right being able to hold usdc onchain we don't think of that as a product but really it is for a large part of the global population this very much is a product so for our rationale was if we can kind of build um something like a way for people to access this technology even without building any more financial protocols ourselves just providing them with access will actually unlock a lot of economic value for them um so the idea behind metri which is the project you're unfamiliar with but not really because it used be Co nois one it

just got a proper name um so metri is based on the safe um it's kind of an it's a nice um uh mobile interface uh buil on a safe back end um and and what it allows you to do is it allows you to onboard your friends really easily kind of they they can kind of set up a new account with um the push of a fingerprint um they can secure it later kind of when they have um significant funds in it they can always add more signers um but they can it gives them the opportunity to kind of hold stable coins they otherwise wouldn't be able to hold kind of wouldn't be able to hold

that currency and that that is is a very simple um use case for us but something that is of a very real value to actual people um and then the way that we think about is kind of okay now you kind of have to um connect it with um the um the Legacy Financial rails that we already have that people already use so you want things like you want an iban integration so kind of you want um your wallet to be addressable by an iban so you send funds to that iban they show up in your wallet you can do seeper transfer right out of your wallet that's All Tech that exists

It's All Tech that kind of we can we just have to put together in one place nosus pay as well so kind of nosis pay is kind of built on the same premise so nosis pay allows you to connect a self custodial wallet such as the save under the hood of the Mattery wallet to um a credit card um allowing you to kind of off ramp your crypto anywhere that Visa is accepted and kind of building those bridges between the old and the new is how we think we can um make adoption happen um and kind of an example that kind of I like to use is the Telecom Revolution right kind of when we were kids um we had we had we had landline

phones and then kind of when we were like teenagers Skype came along kind of you had skape Skype out you could kind of call any landline um phone um for the local tariff and the way that that worked and this is for the younger listeners so basically phoning other countries used to be really really expensive so when I was a kid I had an aunt in America calling her was like the entire family kind of collecting around the the telephone kind of uh saying oh hi hi AE Margaret how's everything going and so on and then kind of we hang up like 3 minutes later and was 10 10 German marks at the time or something um and uh kind of having that um step up to Skype out um where kind of you PID the

local tariff regardless of where you phoned um that was that was fantastic in terms of use experience the way they did it is they kind of they used new rails for the first 95% of the call namely it was routed over the internet and then the last 5% were over the old copper cable um and then kind of as uh as this voice over IP protocol kind of gain traction um and other people had Skype too you could just do everything over the internet and kind of became completely free um and now even when you kind of phone landline phone to landline phone um it it will still be routed over the Internet it'll be still be voice over IP don't actually do this on copper cables anymore and I think it'll be the

same for um Financial ra so uh in 10 years all the infrastructure will be blockchain based it's just that we kind of have to um have to take out bits and replace them by the equivalent uh blockchain infrastructure that is hardier and simpler um and by and without people noticing in the process so I think the user experience will stay largely the same as it did with kind of calling someone on the phone yeah that's a great analogy uh I I really like that and uh I'm reminded of just how much regulatory push back there was also on Skype and and all these voice over IP uh providers uh because they were I think I think

telecom companies saw that they were going to either have to adapt or you lose a large part of their um revenues um for for voice calling which you know they have they've made up with really expensive internet plans and and and this sort of thing but um yeah I I I I I think that one of the so one of the use cases I I absolutely love about this whole like nois pay infrastructure is the iban to blockchain uh so I I use manium fairly regularly for you know personal use but also for my my company and that being able to send money on to send money to an iban and it appears on

chain and vice versa send money from a chain uh to a bank account and it it's instant it happens in seconds I mean it uses the the instant sepa um infrastructure rails which allows you to get sepa transfers in in you less than 10 seconds it's it's magic it just feels great to be able to uh move in and out um of of a chain without having to go through like you know your Kraken account or some other exchange that on onramp off-ramp it's so seamless and you know there's so many improvements that that could be made there I think just from that particular use case uh namely you know with manium uh the ability just to uh to to swap directly

into that Euro coin Etc I mean I I think maybe they've added that by now but but nosis pay is kind of similar where uh and and I don't even have a nosis pay card yet I'm just talking from what others have told me I need to get one I need to apply for it but uh but yeah with nosis pay you have you have funds on on chain and if you've used one of these you know crypto to credit card services before typically what you have to do is you have to onboard you have to you have to um uh top up your card right so you have to send money to an address then it shows up on the card and and then you can make your payments but but here the the card is actually signing a transaction on chain on your

account and so you don't need to do this this kind of top up um thing that introduces some interesting privacy issues that I'd love to get your opinion on as someone who I know is like very um particular it's sort of careful about you know your onchain privacy what like what are the risks that people uh get into here when using this card where essentially every not not not just onchain transactions but also their their real world transactions like every time they buy a baguette you know um which is for me every day uh you know that shows up on chain what's the I mean what's the risk here and and how do

we resolve this this issue yeah this is the main issue at the moment so kind of we decided to kind of launch this knowing that the Privacy was non-existent um just because there were other other heavy lifts kind of engineering uh of of you know in in the engineering of this that kind of we just needed to get out of the door and kind of we couldn't work on this web so um yeah privacy um so I mean c currently um when you go to your local Baker um and you pay two €290 for a baguette um €290 um the 2ar 90 uh payment show I don't know where you're buying baguettes

but uh how much is the baguette in Paris these days the baguett in Paris are like a buck 25 okay this is I need to go back to Paris sometime uh that sounds wonderful yeah so you you pay you pay €125 for your baguette um and uh that payment shows up on chain you you can't see that it goes to the baker because it actually goes to the monium offramp account um so all payments kind of go to the same address and then the the the settlement of them is actually batched um we try to obis skate a bit by kind of rolling different trans transactions together but it's not very

good alisation um so you are 100% right that kind of the privacy aspect of this currently is the Achilles heal why do I still use it because basically I think it's important that kind of we eyeon out um as much of the user experience aspects um as we can when we can um we're we're working on the Privacy aspect so there will be a privacy respecting uh version um I don't want to say soonish because that'll jinx it um also privacy onchain is pretty hard um but yeah we're working on it I know it's a problem and we we will address it yeah the other aspect here is the

regulatory um the regulatory issue which is that I mean well I I know that that that policy makers at least here in France and and some at the EU level are pushing for all crypto transactions uh whether they're happening on an exchange or some kind of payment service provider for that data to be automatically sent to local uh tax um uh like the local tax authorities I think this is you know I obviously a massive infringements on people's rights to privacy uh where you know we're not talking here about a government being

able to sort of subpoena uh or request uh 's transactions information because there is a suspicion of a crime or evading taxes Etc we're talking here about wholesale all transactions uh being available to the state uh at any at any point in time what types of technological improvements can can be made to products like nosis pay to curb uh at least to some extent uh this infringement that I it's just not in place right but I I know that there are policy makers that are uh that are um proponents of this sort of blanket um blanket you know Gustavo

style uh data collection yeah so I mean this is also why many lawmakers push for cbdcs uh because basically everything is transparent and on chain um I think um we need to push back here on a cultural level and say privacy is normal privacy basically um I uh I morally object um to having this sort of transparency for the state I think how it can be mitigated um and how it should be mitigated because I also I also see the legitimate interest of states to collect taxes so I don't

think all taxation is theft and so on I think um by and large states um deserve to collect taxes and pay for public goods that way obviously the way that they collect them is um should be um improved in a technological way so for instance we could have something like um zero knowledge proof um attached um to transactions um saying okay this transaction of A Private Matter for instance I am gifting my sister 10,000 Euro um so she can kind of put a down payment on a house sort of thing that is not tax it

shouldn't be taxable I kind of attach a proof that this is nothing to be taxed um the state shouldn't have to know whom I'm sending it to or why I'm sending it and so on just it should just know that in principle this is not a taxable event um same for other things if I sell something to someone obviously this is a taxable event and this could also be kind of conveyed with a zero knowledge proof um so I think um keeping people honest and kind of enforcing honesty while at the same time um protecting privacy this is kind of the goldilock zone for me um and I think we can get there the one thing that really worries

me is how much privacy um has already been undercut um by um and regulatorily captured um and I worry that um while Regulators usually say this is to protect and uh to make sure that taxes are paid and so on um I worry that this is not the only motive and they will be yeah and that worry about it it's it's actually not the only motive yeah that they will be resistant to kind of changing this to a way that is demonstrably um fair and effed effective at enforcing taxes while

at the same time still being privacy preserving and I think this is a battle we will have to fight um generally as as as a people um and uh we're we're here to fight it right I I think like the good faith argument that uh that ZK is the technology that enables states to have oversight over the types of transactions I mean not not just in this case I mean there's all sorts of use cases where CK could allow people to have privacy while ensuring some form of attestation about it could be whatever it could be a transaction it could be someone's uh where someone's

living it could be someone's income like there's like all sorts of really interesting use cases that allow us to have sort of like this Best of Both Worlds type of scenario the the fact that I I think that these technologies will never be adopted in in full deployment because they don't allow States uh nation states and you know sort of EU uh governance machine to have full visibility into people's dealings like I I I think that fundamentally this is out opposition with the modus operandi of the European governance

system um that you know increasingly wants to have more and more data and information uh and access to that data information on its citizens and um I know this not only in Europe I know like in other places like in the States you know like although the states I think have uh much better constitutional protections but but many most European countries I think don't have those the same constitutional protections that and and puts us at risk of of being becoming part of this police state I mean can use these Technologies for terrible things right I mean kind of you can you can do an incredibly effective kind of social School kind of like China has using these un these immutable Ledges I think it it's it's a battle we will have to

fight and I think kind of um imbuing people with the certainty that privacy is normal privacy should be the norm this is something that is um this is something that we have to do absolutely I want to talk a little bit about the evm here um and you know nosis of course like we've talked about before is one of the the the the uh most OG teams building on the evm and the evm has really dominated uh the the developer ecosystem for blockchains you

know solidity is is by by a large margin the most used smart contract language to build on blockchains across the not only ethereum but the entire evm ecosystem uh but solidity and and the evm are next year going to be 10 years old and you know if we're thinking now that you know we're arriving at a place where we can now start to have applications built on blockchains and that essentially we're sort of in the you know I sort of I of see us as somewhere like I I see this moment akin to the kind of like when when the iPhone came out you we had the internet before that but things really took

off when we had mobile and that's also when we saw a shift from PHP in the lamp stack to a very modular and modern development stack in the form of mostly like node and um and modularizing the uh um uh the the the the um the development stack so like AWS for instance um and the the cloud stack have very modular components that allow developers to kind of pick and choose and scale um their applications so from the perspective of the evm you know I kind of see the evm and and solidity a little bit like PHP where they're very important and and

crucial to crypto as like a foundational piece of software infrastructure for crypto but I think are going sort of in the way of becoming Legacy software so in 10 years from now when the evm is 20 years old you know do we think that most college kids will be learning to learn learning to code solidity or some other language that is modern built for the modular infrastructure interoperable uh doesn't have the performance and security issues of the evm performant ETC and so that that's kind of like my perspective on the evm and then solidity I think probably you don't share that that perspective uh exactly uh but you

know looking long term like 10 years from now you know nosis will most likely still be an evm chain but there's going to be lots of other chains out there that are leveraging Modern Performance safe secure uh programming languages um how do you see that playing out long term and in terms of like the EVMS and solidities market share and you think that it can continue to compete and remain relevant uh in this uh fastpac you know sort of like evolving um infrastructure space in crypto yeah so I think I think the evm I think we're not so far far apart in kind of what we believe here so I think the evm will re

remain relevant kind of as um the underlying I think um people in 10 years will not learn to program so but I also believe people in 10 years will not learn to program any other programming language because um large language models and uh other Transformer like um software systems will be so good at kind of understanding what we want software to do that they will build this for us so I think this will be abstracted away from us in a um much larger manner than most people currently believe and yes I think kind of what what thing kind of compiled to down

below people won't know about and won't care just like they don't know um how uh how kind of your uh your python script today is transformed into bite code that can actually be executed by uh by silicon suckets right yeah no that makes sense uh I mean I I agree with that more development work will be done by AI agents U like Transformer types um but there remains I think some really important things to note about the evm like performance compared to some of the other you know parallelized VMS in

crypto that allow for just like much faster and much higher throughput uh there are the security issues that remain right in in the form of like re-entrancy attacks Etc um and then some features that uh exist in other Frameworks that that don't exist in the evm like for example in the move uh VM we have the ability to have keys that are per application so this enables some containerization or um of of like security risks uh introp ability being embedded in um other languages like for example kmm being able to leverage IBC these sorts of things like do do you think that the evm

in its current form and validity in its current form as being like a very low-level blockchain language should include uh or or do you think that like these features will get built on top of the evm as like supplements and other layers on top or do like this kind of framework approach do you think it makes sense for that to become part of the underlying uh framework like VM framework I so um I think it goes without saying that if you were to kind of construct the evm from scratch again today you would make some ch ch choices differently than kind of we made them back in the day I think this is a

completely Fair Point to make I think almost everything that you mentioned can be implemented on top of the existing evm stack it won't be quite as efficient as if it were implemented kind of at the lowest possible level but I think in the in the grand scheme that won't matter so much because the ebm has such um a head start in terms of um developer attention and um kind of resources that have been created around it that competing with it won't just require being a little bit better here

and there it would actually require being 10x better um and I I don't see that happening uh so even with paraly paralyzable systems to a certain extent we can actually do that by having different execution environments and then kind of trustly connecting them together kind of like um IBC style so I think there are work grounds for all of these things and kind of having um I think where ethereum has actually er um where we can kind of learn from the cosmos style um blockchain um ecosystems um is having a native IBC type thing um so kind of having native interoperability kind of build

into the system here I think this was the largest um thing that kind of was um neglected um kind of for evm type systems but also for that I think we're catching up um so I think kind of at at this point I would still bet on the evm I don't think it's it's I wouldn't uh I wouldn't put all my money on it I think it's still possible that it'll be overtaken by other other systems but it won't be for small efficiency gains yeah no I think that makes sense I I think

that I I I do think that that this so story of PHP and ASP as the dominant development languages in the 2000s um is a comparable analogy where PHP still I think po something like 60 to 70% of websites on the internet because it Powers this like Legacy infrastructure or this like uh um so I think like most of Facebook is built in PHP uh WordPress which is like I don't know 50% of the websites on the internet you know uses PHP so there are like a handful of really important pieces of Internet software that continue to use PHP and that um uh make

up for the majority of the deployments uh but but new applications like new startups Etc are mostly building like using other languages and I I think I think that this is a similar path that the evm will take where very important crypto infrastructure a compound synthetics uh you know uh unit swap Etc like these very large very important pieces of financial rails will continue to use the evm and and and fund the EVMS development also perhaps um while you know newer applications l2s app chains uh will use other languages most likely

so that's kind of where I where I see things heading I wonder if that makes sense to you yeah absolutely and I mean that's what we see today right I mean a large number of l2s actually decided against using um the evm right so kind of uh yeah cool uh maybe just one one final question here as we wrap up um So currently nois chain is a sovereign chain I guess you could even call it a sovereign app chain because it it it it is an application that allows you to run Financial rails uh it it runs uh kind of like very precise and very specific

types of of of applications uh but will gnosis become an L2 at some point like is there a world in which uh nosis rents its security from another chain like ethereum that's a tough one um I think as you ask a question the answer is probably no I also wouldn't call noses an app chain because it's very much a general purpose chain and there's all kinds of applications on it um but I think we will start thinking about l2s and l1s in a much more Neons way um so we even see that already with kind of validium where kind of um we see um l2s that um check into um the L1

periodically and kind of how often that is obviously this is this is a Cadence that you can set um but but kind of the data availability is not on E for cost reasons it's elsewhere um and uh we we also see these uh uh these Sovereign rollups which some people say aren't actually roll rollups at all but basically kind of where um where where kind of the you can kind of play with um how many validators you have for that particular rollup kind of what the rules are how to become a to how to become a validator how validators are slashed if they misbehave um how often in these

chains kind of check in with ethereum how much of their their um data they actually poess call data or in the blobs um or where else to post them so I don't think this is kind of going to be a binary thing you're an L2 or you're not an L2 it's kind of going to be a continuous spectrum and I think we can actually imagine a world where noses regularly checks in with ethereum and kind of posts it state to ethereum you can also Imagine a word where ethereum does the same with nosis right kind of where ethereum regularly post the the has of the ethereum state to nosis chain that that wouldn't automatically make ethereum and L2 to nois right it would kind of just make them Federated in some way and I think um kind of having a

better terminology of kind of how um how chains check in with each other and kind of what the trust assumptions are for transaction transacting between chains I think this will have to come because at this point it's um it's not granular enough yeah I know that makes sense uh and I I I I'm going to push back on the app chain thing I I think nosis is an app chain the app is generalized smart contracts and but but I think it's I I call it an app chain because it has a specific like it has a vertical that is kind of it's go to market and and that vertical is very much like foundational Financial infrastructure and so you know

it's not it's not an app chain the same way that like osmosis is an app chain that has an app right and that app is a DEX and then there's also other applications built on top of Osmosis so you could also say that like osmosis to some extent is a a generalized although it's not fully permissionless um but yeah I think I I I see where you're coming from and I think this makes sense in kind of um defining the vertical because um what kind of different things in the same vertical often haveen common common is kind of how much they're willing to pay for a transaction how much security they need right kind of so if you were to have a if you were to have a a chain that primarily um caters to games um the security assumptions

that kind of you need as a game developer are probably very different than the security assumptions you you you need if kind of you want to have um uh the land registry on chain right so and I think kind of making sure that the um trust assumptions that come with the chain in terms of kind of how how um how the validator set is chosen what happens if they misbehave um what what are the the trust assumptions you have for bridging and so on um I think this has to be in keeping with what you're trying to secure and obviously kind of nosis chain is um is very credibly neutral in the sense that it's decentralized

no one one validator kind of can sway the the the thing just like on ethereum um then it makes complete sense to kind of say okay this primarily caters to financial applications because obviously Financial applications have in common that there's usually money at stake great FICA this has been really terrific uh it's you know being being in the being in the guest spot not so not so uh not so hard right like uh I think it did pretty well thank you uh before we wrap up I I do want to uh plug nebular Summit um I haven't talked about hero on epicenter so much I've talked about it on my other podcast but uh yeah

nebul Summit is the interchain developer conference that we are hosting we interop Ventures uh it is happening in Brussels after EC on July 12th and 13th so if you're interested in learning about the cosmos ecosystem the modular app chain ecosystem and so much more uh it's not just a cosmos conference in fact this year you know we're trying to go beyond Cosmos we're getting more folks from other ecosystems ethereum uh the evm ecosystem salana uh movement Etc um so come to nebular Summit it's a developer event so most of the talks and content is very technical we have developer workshops there there's also an investor speed dating so if you're interested in meeting VCS to pit your

idea and hopefully get funding you can also do that you can apply for that uh everything is available at neb. Builders so here you can apply for investor speed dating and also get your tickets so once again that's July 12th and 13th in Brussels really hope to see you there I'm I'm bummed out you won't be at ECC this year uh but I'm sure there going be lots of nosis people there um so looking forward to seeing those those people great thanks so much Fela thank you for having me on